Free Hunter Killer by James Rouch Page B

World War. It took a reminder from the Japanese to get you into the second. You’re only in this one because half your troops were stoked up on drugs when the balloon went pop, and the Ruskies clouted seven thousand of your men on the first day.’
    It was not going to be that easy to get Dooley away from his pet subject, even using provocation of that magnitude. So determined was he not to be sidetracked, he virtually ignored the sniper’s interruption except to glower in his direction and threateningly ball a huge fist. ‘They’re all the fucking same you know, the Swiss, the Swedes, the Finns, the Frogs; they’re all a fuck sight more neutral towards the Commies than they are to us. It’s only a couple of months since the Swiss shot down that Casevac transport. First thing I did when I heard about that was to go to a club I knew they used, to crack a few heads. When I got there I had to join a queue. Take the Swedes, smug bastards: free health care, free love and free coming and going for half the Red spies in Europe. And all the time they keep bleating about their neutrality while their factories keep supplying the fucking Ruskies with everything from telegraph poles to fur caps.’
    ‘They have the highest suicide rate in the whole of Europe you know.’ ‘Let me know when it reaches a hundred per cent, I’ll give a cheer.’ Dooley turned to see who had come in, it was Boris. He took in the man’s battered face and torn clothing, roughly held together by an assortment of improvised fasteners. ‘I’m glad to see those bricks made a real mess of you. I couldn’t be happier if it had happened to Burke. Nothing broken is there? No? What a pity!’
    ‘You do not have to like me, I do not expect you to, but you should try to remember that we are fighting on the same side. Would you have spoken in the same way to Solzhenitsyn, or any of the other dissidents from the pre-war days?’
    ‘There’s the world of fucking difference between a dissident and a deserter. Those guys thought that way from the start, and said so. They didn’t wait till they’d served a year in the Red Army, and had just been moved to the front before coming round to that way of thinking. I know your sort. Cruddy arse-licking party member while everything is going well in the motherland, then a whining shit- scared coward when your piddling little post at some factory suddenly comes off the exemption list.’
    Shoving the Russian roughly aside, Dooley stamped out of the room. In passing, he kicked two of the bottom rails from the stairs and booted their splintered remains ahead of him.
    ‘You were lucky there, Boris.’ Burke listened to the American’s noisy progress to the control room. ‘Friend Dooley gets really worked up when he’s waiting to go into action, it ties him in knots. The only way he can let off steam is to lash out. If he’d swiped at you, you’d have snapped as easy as those rails.’
    Boris sat on the corner of the wobbly pine table dominating the centre of the room. It creaked beneath him, but took his weight. Like the few other pieces of furniture remaining in the house it was too heavy and cumbersome for the owners to take with them in their rush to leave the place, and of too little value to be of interest to the looters who’d dared visit the island after the Swedish government had declared it a prohibited area on the outbreak of war, at the time of the first battles in the waters of the Kattegat.
    ‘I should tell you, I was not a combat soldier with the Red Army. I was, I am a technician. That is all.’ Boris took cigarette papers and a pinch of dark, almost black, tobacco from a stained leather pouch. He rolled the long ‘ shreds into the valley of white paper he made between thumb and forefinger, licked its edge and lit the finished cigarette with a lighter fashioned from a Russian 12.7mm heavy machine gun cartridge case. He toyed with it.
    ‘And neither was I an intellectual, with the protection of